When Melissa Breyer packed up her bag on Monday night time for her Tuesday morning volunteer shift with the Audubon Society, she determined to noticeably put together.

Her activity wasn’t to participate in one of many society’s chicken counts—not less than not a depend of dwelling birds. She was participating in Project Safe Flight, an effort to trace what number of migratory birds die navigating New York. She loaded up her backpack with dozens of plastic baggage to hold chicken carcasses in addition to paper baggage outfitted to gingerly transport injured birds to caretakers—a number of occasions the variety of baggage that she usually brings along with her on a shift. The forecasts had been exhibiting that a whole lot of migrating birds can be flying into town on Monday night time and Tuesday morning, and he or she wished to be ready.

“I packed my bag, like really packed it, packed it full, full, full, of all the supplies I could,” Breyer, the editorial director of the environmental publication Treehugger, mentioned.

That foresight sadly turned out to be prescient. In the two-and-a-half hours Breyer spent surveying the World Trade Center complicated in downtown Manhattan starting at daybreak, she noticed a whole lot of lifeless birds. Tuesday was a very grotesque day for migratory birds in New York City in what’s a harmful season for winged creatures passing via town en path to hotter locales for the winter alongside the Atlantic Flyway.

“As soon as I got there, I saw more birds than I could count in every direction I looked as far as I could see,” she mentioned. “To the right, to left straight ahead, I was just in shock.”

Breyer collected 226 carcasses of birds that had perished after collisions with home windows. She additionally collected 30 injured birds to drop off on the Wild Bird Fund’s chicken rescue heart. On glass awnings on the World Trade Center buildings, she noticed one other 35 birds that died after hitting home windows.

The staggering demise toll on the one location tallied up in only a few hours was due to some instant components. An enormous surge of migrating birds got here via town. There was additionally a storm on Monday night time, and turbulent climate can disorient birds and trigger them to fly decrease, making window collisions extra possible.

But chicken deaths amid clear climate are widespread, too. The Audubon Society estimates that as much as 230,000 birds die from crashing into home windows annually, with upticks throughout Atlantic Flyway migration season when droves of birds touring 1000’s of miles in each hemispheres. Kaitlyn Parkins, affiliate director of conservation & science with NYC Audubon, mentioned there are two major drivers of the collisions.

“We get nocturnal collisions that are caused by disorienting lights,” she mentioned. “Birds are attracted to and disoriented by lights, so lights from buildings can bring them into areas where they are at risk of colliding with buildings. On Monday night, we saw a lot of overnight collisions. And then the other reason for the collisions is the reflective glass all over the city. That night, the number of migrants that were here was so high and birds were colliding with windows throughout the morning and even into the afternoon.”

A mass chicken mortality occasion occurred final spring, although on a smaller scale than Monday night time’s scene on the World Trade Center, when dozens of migratory birds wound up lifeless exterior a glass-sheathed Harlem apartment building. (Rita McMahon, director of Wild Bird Fund, known as it a “bloodbath” on the time.)

This isn’t only a downside in New York City, both. Collisions are the second largest chicken killer within the U.S., second solely to being killed by outside cats. Parkins mentioned some estimates point out as many as 1 billion birds die colliding with home windows annually.

These numbers are grim, however we all know the way to decrease them. One necessary mitigation technique is to show off lights at night time—a easy step that research present can drastically reduce deaths. Some Texas municipalities have applied this technique on a city-wide degree with “lights out” insurance policies. Those insurance policies, although, have been troublesome to implement within the so-called metropolis that by no means sleeps.

Another necessary repair is to make home windows extra seen. On that entrance, New York City has made necessary progress. In 2019, the City Council handed a legislation requiring all new buildings’ glass panels to make their glass panels extra bird-friendly, together with by making them translucent or opaque, or by etching patterns into them to make them extra seen. It doesn’t have an effect on present buildings just like the World Trade Center, although, however the Audubon Society is working to alter that so extra buildings within the metropolis are bird-safe.

If you’re involved about chicken collisions—and admittedly, they’re regarding—there are methods you’ll be able to assist as a person, too. You can flip off your porch lights earlier than you fall asleep every night time so birds aren’t drawn to your home windows. And you’ll be able to put adhesive decals in your home windows so birds see that they’re there, too. If you’re in New York City, you may as well volunteer with Project Safe Flight and assist monitor chicken collisions.

“The only good thing about solutions is that we do know how to fix them,” mentioned Parkins.